James Giago Davies. Photo by Native Sun News Today
A flexibility of mind and spirit
Why ideas are the best currency
By James Giago Davies
Native Sun News Today Columnist
nativesunnews.today Back before the internet idea people were bobbing on a turbulent sea of alien indifference. Vastly outnumbered and isolated from others of creative genius and insight they had succeeded throughout history in refining and advancing human culture, despite being routinely scoffed at as eccentric dingbats, or singled out as dangerous agitators. For the first time though the internet provided idea people separated by far-flung borders and wide oceans an opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with a disparate complement of other idea people, people they previously could not have met and befriended in a dozen lifetimes. The people obstructing idea people are seldom identified for who they are, but Socrates first did so, and Eleanor Roosevelt echoed his observation millennia later in her weekly radio broadcast: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” Most people can get through life mostly exchanging the currency of people and events, they can enjoy great success, and what ideas they do recognize and apply are concrete schemes, not inspired paradigm altering insights, hence a predictable president like Donald Trump. Trump isn’t necessarily a bad guy, and he accurately reflects the nature and priorities of the majority of the electorate. He isn’t going to be the rogue fascist monster people mistakenly fear he will be. He is a process respecting team player, an organism fixated on people and events, possessing a mind rife with concrete schemes, and he knows the world which runs Washington, and he will just dive in and hog slop in more of same. In the old days, people could wallow in their uncharitable pre-disposition, nothing challenged enough of their number to alter perceptions much, although idea people such as Mark Twain recognized the problem and offered what solution was possible: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
Read the rest of the story on the Native Sun News Today website: A flexibility of mind and spirit (Contact James Giago Davies at skindiesel@msn.com) Copyright permission Native Sun News
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